Monday, August 13, 2012

The second new capability is designed to help combine the local repository offered by Git with the integration application lifecycle management solution offered by Team Foundation Server.

Git-tf is a new cross-platform bridge which was announced today and allows developers to combine the local repository capabilities of Git with the integrated application lifecycle management tooling of Team Foundation Server.

Now you can use a Git repository locally, and when you're ready to, check in code to TFS. You can even continue to take advantage of integration between work items (such as bugs and requirements) in TFS when you want to enable end-to-end traceability of the relationship between your work and your code changes. This bridge is a cross-platform tool built with Java, so it runs on many operating systems, including OS X, Linux, and Windows. This means that you can use Git clients (such as Xcode) and maintain the ability to check code into Team Foundation Server.

"Distributed Version Control (DVCS) has a growing following. It enables a set of workflows that can be very handy and Git is an increasingly popular DVCS solution. Today, we are announcing Git-tf, a solution that enables you to work locally with a Git repo – edit, commit, revert, branch, merge, etc. and then “sync up” with a central TFS repository. In this way, you can have the best of both DVCS and TFS.

Git-tf works great in hybrid teams. You may have a TFS project that’s been running for a while. Most of your dev team is using our Visual Studio or Eclipse integration and perfectly happy. At the same time, you’ve got a few people who want or need to use Git. Maybe they are the XCode developers on the team and they like the native Git integration in the XCode IDE. Git-tf allows them to work with XCode’s Git integration and collaborate with other team members through TFS.

The integration takes the form of a new command line tool called “Git-tf”. Git-tf works with a standard Git install and getting started is super easy. Just visit our download page and checkout Git-TF_Getting_Started.html. Installing Git-tf is as simple as unzipping the Zip. At the moment Git-tf won’t work with Team Foundation Service – it will only work with an on premises TFS server – either 2008, 2010 or 2012. However we are working on adding support for Team Foundation Service and I expect it will be available in the next sprint deployment.

Git-tf is a new cross-platform bridge which was announced today and allows developers to combine the local repository capabilities of Git with the integrated application lifecycle management tooling of Team Foundation Server.

Now you can use a Git repository locally, and when you're ready to, check in code to TFS. You can even continue to take advantage of integration between work items (such as bugs and requirements) in TFS when you want to enable end-to-end traceability of the relationship between your work and your code changes. This bridge is a cross-platform tool built with Java, so it runs on many operating systems, including OS X, Linux, and Windows. This means that you can use Git clients (such as Xcode) and maintain the ability to check code into Team Foundation Server.

In this video, Matthew Mitrik, a program manager on the Team Foundation Server team, shows off this new capability.

Quick details

Overview

Git-TF is a set of cross-platform, command line tools that facilitate sharing of changes between TFS and Git. These tools allow a developer to use a local Git repository, and configure it to share changes with a TFS server. Using the tools, changes made in TFS can be pulled into a local Git repository, and changes made in the Git repository can be checked in to TFS. These tools can be used by individuals or teams collaborating using Git. By downloading the tools from the link below, you accept the Git-TF for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 license agreement.

Git-TF V1.0

About the tools

Git-TF is a set of command line tools that facilitate the use of a local Git repository with TFS. These tools make it easy to clone sources from TFS, fetch updates from TFS, and to update TFS with changes committed locally in Git.

Release notes

The shelve command is still in development. The command should not be used with production data until it is updated in a future release.

Installation

Supported Platforms

Git-TF is supported on the following platforms:

Windows 7 (x86, x64), Windows Vista, Windows XP SP3

Linux with GLIBC 2.3 to 2.11 (x86, x86_64, PowerPC)

Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.6 (PowerPC, Intel)

Solaris 8, 9, 10 (SPARC, x86, x86-64)

AIX 5.2 to 6.1 (POWER)

HP-UX 11i v1 to v3 (PA-RISC, Itanium)

Supported TFS Versions

Git-TF is supported for use with the following versions of TFS (servers):

Team Foundation Server 2012

Team Foundation Server 2010

Team Foundation Server 2008

Prerequisites

Any of the following versions of the Java runtime (latest versions available from http://www.java.com):

Sun Java™ 1.5 to 6, or IBM Java™ 1.5 to 6 on Microsoft Windows

Apple Java™ 1.5 to 6 on Mac OS X

Sun Java™ 1.5 to 6 on Linux or Solaris

IBM Java™ 1.5 to 6 on Linux or AIX

HP Java™ 1.5 to 6 on HP-UX

It is recommended that the latest version of Git is installed as well. It is not strictly needed to use Git-TF, but it will be useful in working with the local repository created by the tools. Information about the latest Git downloads can be found on: http://git-scm.com/downloads

Installing Git-TF

Extract the contents of Git-TF-Release-Preview.zip to a folder on your local machine, i.e. C:\git-tf on Windows, or /user/git-tf on Mac/Linux.

I've been hearing some rumbling about TFS and GIT, I wonder if this was it? Anyway, this the best of both worlds or a Franken-beast? I'm going to say that I'm glad to see this and I 'm glad to see Microsoft and the TFS team trying to embrace DVCS.

Oh, you did catch that the source for git-ts is available (well, is in the processing of becoming available) too, right? http://gittf.codeplex.com/ I actually think that's the coolest thing about this...